An extremely respected and well known blogger asked me to help build a tool which would perhaps be of good use to the blogger and web development community, which wouldn’t be too hard to build. But it got me thinking, nowadays a lot of services are out there which supposedly speed up or enhance the way we work with technology in the first place.
Someone once figured out that some websites have frequently updated content, which people visit, so instead of making the users visit the websites, it would be a much better idea if the content was bought to them. Thus the humble feed reader evolved.
But often, while a process is streamlined, people try to do more and more and more to “optimize” the system. Soon you see hundreds of articles to help you manage feed overload, hundreds of bookmarking tools, etc, etc, to help you read and connect to more and more articles.
But there’s only so much you can make more efficient. I don’t want this to go tangent into something that sounds like a “back in my day, we needed to climb three mountains just to read our email” story, but tell me, how many times have you found yourself clicking the “next” button or key again and again, barely reading any stories, and only absorbing what catches your fancy. How is this so much better than the days when people checked a website once, and actually read everything.
I’m not trying to say that “all the internet is crap”, but there was one point when I felt very afraid that the Internet is making me impatient and restless with the need for that “new story, article or tool”, that it almost spilled into my regular life.
The internet is crazy about having everything in one place. It’s about convergence and collection, yes, and it’s the natural order of things, but I’ve found joy in newfound minimalism and disconnectivity.
But I can’t help shake the feeling that the myspace and youtube generation might really hurt humanity in the time to come.
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